REFORMERS TOO HESTITANT ABOUT CHANGE

PETER B. PACH; Courant ColumnistTHE HARTFORD COURANT

C When I was first interested in girls, my heart fairly screamed in my chest. Early crushes were a roller coaster of young desire and abject fear.

With one early crush, I remember agonizing over making the first phone call. Everything was in place technically. I memorized the telephone number, I had no trouble dialing it and I knew the first 10 words I would say -- if only my heart would get out of my mouth.

I pulled the telephone to as remote a spot as the cord would allow and dialed. It was several attempts before I actually let it ring.

Years later, I still can feel the ironic tension of desperately wanting to do something and being afraid of taking the steps that would make it happen.

It's a far cry from a boyhood crush, but I feel the same push-pull tension among would-be school reformers.

They talk about making changes, but when it's time to make the call, they get cold feet.

Tuesday morning, 280 business and civic leaders listened to speech after speech calling for school reform during a forum sponsored by The Courant, WFSB-TV and the Connecticut Business for Education Coalition.

The forum is part of a nationwide campaign called "Help Wanted: Education Required." The gist of the campaign is that American schools are not producing students with the "critical thinking skills" modern jobs demand. We all agreed that schools need new direction. But no one offered a way to initiate change, despite being able to describe the problems in depressing detail.

The system is not training students with skills that match the demands of industry, said Joe B. Wyatt, chancellor of Vanderbilt University. He touts a video teaching system, a tool developed at his school, that captures students' attention with its slick production and introduces them to problem solving.

"Education has no value today," said Christine H. Perry, past president of the Connecticut Parent Teacher Association. "Education was a value in the 1950s." Perry has noticed many changes in 40 years. School misconduct used to involve talking in class, chewing

gum and running in the halls. Today, misconduct involves drug and alcohol use, assault and an array of social problems uncommon in the 1950s. Parents who are single, divorced and working spend less time with their children.

Hartford's new school superintendent, T. Josiha Haig, talked Tuesday about reform from kindergarten to high school. He has the skills to organize such change, he said. Haig could havelisted specific changes he plans this month or even this year, but he never did.

Teachers favor new approaches to education, said Mark Waxenberg, president of the Connecticut Education Association. But, Waxenberg warned, education is a 200-year-old bureaucracy that will resist change. These are hardly the words of a reformer. Still, he insisted that teachers should be allowed to create change. They know the problems and should help solve them. There are schools where new, trial programs are exciting students and improving education, but they are isolated. In the end, many of the experts blame lack of reform on citizens who haven't demanded change. But those who want change need not wait to use their problem-solving skills. The need for change is clear.